ChasNote

Om himself says it best:

“Three years ago, when John Battelle and Chas Edwards met with me for a cup of coffee across the street from the old Business 2.0 offices in downtown San Francisco, their company, Federated Media, was still in its infancy, and our company, Giga Omni Media, was little more than a dream.

“John, a long-time friend and a peer from the tech media world, asked me if I would sign on with his studio of talent and let them represent my then one-man effort, GigaOM.com, commercially. Naturally, I said yes. In the time that passed we had our ups and downs, successes and embarrassments. But we progressed and prospered together.

“…Federated Media has become more than just a studio for technology bloggers, but a leader in the conversational marketing movement.

“Progress is often accompanied by a divergence of ideas and ambitions within partnerships. At Giga Omni Media, we have been developing a network that revolves around niche verticals. As our needs became more specialized, we sat down with the folks at Federated to try and figure out how we could continue to work together. But both sides quickly realized that instead it was time to wrap up what has been a successful business relationship.”

Om and Paul, it’s good thing our offices are only two blocks apart; I still owe you tacos.

More from PaidContent:

“While this is not a significant monetary setback for Federated, it does point to what the John Battelle-founded online-ad company is giving up as it continues to scale: Its focus has been on large-scale national advertisers and creating both general and custom programs with them, as opposed to the more ‘intimate’ sells required for enterprise-focused vendors that GOM attracts. FM has a big-brand focus, for most part, and beyond its early start with tech sites, it has now moved into all kinds of other verticals like parenting, food, graphic arts, small business and others.”

Om talks to Yahoo about the dearth of premium online CPMs: The web needs more quality content and something that makes the content unique. For example, the GigaOM sites!

I couldn’t agree more, Om.

Except when you say GigaOM competes with the ad networks. The GigaOM sites — sold individually to brands that want to associate with the premium, exclusive content in the rarefied context that is reading a site like GigaOM or New Tee Vee — live at the top of the media-pricing pyramid. That’s not to say that unsold inventory on those sites can’t be sold as part of a blind ad network like AdSense or Blue Lithium. Publishers such as GigaOM, FM, or ESPN offer one kind of value (building brand value through association with quality), and ad networks offer another kind of value (low-cost clicks that answer a direct-response need). The two can use inventory from the same sites symbiotically, if both entities understand the value they bring to the marketplace.

(Disclosure: The GigaOM sites are part of the FM family so I’m biased when I say you should buy ads on them.)

You careful ChasNote readers may have seen this coming when you read last month about Chevy’s sponsorship the Best of the Green Web project (or Dell’s sponsorship of a green drawing contest in Facebook’s Graffiti), but now it’s official. FM has launched its Green Federation, a collection of the best green-leaning sites online, including Inhabitat, GigaOM’s Earth2Tech and the ViroPOP video network.

Here’s the press release.

According to analysis by Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb, Ars Technica is the source of 87 front page Digg stories in the past 30 days, making Ars the top source for Digg conversations. Gizmodo and Engaget are close behind, filling out the top three. TechCrunch, GigaOM, VentureBeat, ReadWriteWeb and Mashable are other FM sites in the top ten. These are the brands that start the conversations, while Digg spreads the conversation to a much wider audience.

Techmeme’s Leaderboard does a similar analysis of sites-of-origin for stories tracked by its service. For the past 30 days, the top ten (in order) is TechCrunch, CNET, Engadget, NY Times, Ars Technica, ReadWriteWeb, Silicon Alley Insider, WSJ, The Register, and PaidContent.

At AllBusiness, Om says:

“The focus here is 80 percent original reporting and 20 percent opinions…. People want real information. They get tired of opinions quickly. You use that kind of opinion-style blogging as backfill for information, like what traditional news services do. What we are doing is analysis and original reporting, which means we actually go out and talk to people.”